Anti-mass migration populist Vox party banned from Spanish TV debates

The leader of the right-wing populist Vox party who has vowed to “make Spain great again” has been banned by the Spanish election authority from the only confirmed televised debate ahead of country’s general election on April 28th.

The Atresmedia network has been ordered to exclude Santiago Abascal – Vox’s party leader – from its debate following a ruling that was made by Spain’s Central Election Board which held that his presence at the debate wouldn’t be ‘proportional’ to votes cast for the party during the 2015 elections, when the recently founded party failed to win representation in the country’s national parliament.

However, since those elections, Vox has made massive strides in the political arena, becoming Spain’s third largest party during elections in Andalucia last December when it garnered 11 percent of the vote and captured 12 seats. The Spanish mainstream media had predicted that the party would win a measly five seats.

After the popularity of the party has surged in recent years, it now faces total exclusion from an election debate – even when certain polls are predicting the party could finish as the third largest party nationally. In the case that Vox finishes third place in the country’s national elections, it would become a key player in the Spanish parliament and could even become a coalition partner in future governments.

After hearing about the planned exclusion of their party from the debates, Vox took to Twitter, blasting the decision as a clear and unabashed instance of institutional bias against nationalistic and populist parties, arguing that it was made by ‘the same electoral board that greenlighted [left-wing political parties] Podemos and Ciudadanos when they had no representation’.

Just after, party leader Santiago Abascal declared leftists ‘no longer hide’ their true aims to eradicate the conservative party, tweeting, “First [the establishment]tried to manipulate our message in the media, then they sent the hooded vanguard of [Antifa activists] to attack us physically, and now they censor us to prevent Spaniards from hearing us.”

He went on to say, “It’s clear who calls the shots still in Spain: the separatists. Until April 28. Because a great victory for #LongLiveSpain will see those parties who wish to destroy our co-existence, constitution and homeland banned.”

While Atresmedia said that it would respect the election authority’s decision to ‘readapt the format of its debate’ to include only leaders from the center-right liberal Popular Party, the globalist Ciudadanos, the Socialist Workers’ Party, and the far-left Podemos, the network stated that it would file an appeal against the ruling.

In a statement given to the Spanish press, the network said, “Atresmedia maintains that a debate between five candidates is of the greatest journalistic value and most relevance for voters.”

Vox represents Spain’s fastest growing party and has gained significant momentum in the last year since it’s presented itself as the one and only socially conservative, traditionalist, anti-mass migration political force in a field that’s overcrowded with leftists, and where the only supposedly right-wing parties are quite liberal on social issues.

Vox’s Abascal has promised to defend the Spanish people against the increasingly aggressive ‘ideological battle’ waged against them by leftist activists, cultural Marxists, and so-called ‘progressives’.